Advent of Code is an Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like.
This year I will play around with Python, which I'm not super familiar with. Note that problems tends to be more and more complicated as days pass, and there is still only 24h per day, so we'll see how far I go.
Cool puzzle! It was simple enough to not burn multiple hours again, and yet it has a great potential of extensibility.
I didn't have time to code anything on Sunday, so it was my first delay. It was a quick puzzle though, with only string simple manipulation so it didn't took me a long time.
Then with a light heart I opened the 7th puzzle of this year, and quickly understand that I'll be here for quite some time. I did write a simplish tree data structure in Python, and after quite a lot of mistakes along the way I made it work. It was a fun enough problem, but after +/- 3h of struggle I just wanted to finish it and not polish it at all. So this puzzle day ends with a feeling of imperfection.
Hopefully difficulty won't be at this level everyday, because I have other on-going projects...
Today's I was quick to finish the puzzle, which is good because I have a bunch of things to do.
We just had to convert the provided strings 'ABBABAA' into binary. I used the built-in Python binary converter, and that's it.
There was a lot of little things to handle with today's puzzle, which took quite some time. I'm getting more and more confortable with Python syntax and I'm starting to really enjoy it.
Even if the story is... secondary to say the least, I enjoyed the _Papers, Please_ vibe.
It's slowly getting tougher. Today, I spend more time completing the challenge, mostly for two reasons:
I'm pleased to have perfectly anticipated the 2nd part of the problem while writing the code of the part today though: of course the toboggan moves were going to change!
I really didn't have time today, but I didn't want to fail already, so I had to kinda rush it. Python helpers allowed me to finish it quickly though. Having a `.count()` function in the standard string library is pretty sweet, as well as being able to write `a < b < c` instead of `a < b and b < c`.
The first day is fairly easy, even though I see more complex problems arise, and I will need to think about other solutions to handle this more properly if the complexity increases.
I'm more rusty than I thought with Python as I had needed to look up basic syntax.